"After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I'm convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate."

i'm fine with providing a classic ui alongside where we're going now, and in fact with some elements that's what we already do (e.g. the application menu).

Note that this is new code, duplicating old functionality. This is of course fine from a user perspective as long as it can do everything the old code can.

One feature in 3.5 I really enjoy is the MacOS-style menu bar. Nothing (regarding UI) is wrong with normal menu's, it's just that it saves so much desktop space that I can't refuse it. It's not in 4.1, so 4.1 will not be the release that makes me drop 3.5. I have no idea when someone will take the time to implement it: 4.2? 4.3? It's just an example. There'll be silly kicker, kdesktop features that people love a lot.

You know, I still get e-mails from people that they can't use Free Pascal because we haven't implemented compiling to memory yet. Yep, the very fact that there is disk activity makes them refuse the ultra-state-of-the-art Free Pascal compiler above the 16 years old Turbo Pascal compiler. Silly feature, very difficult to implement portably for me, but people care about those silly little features, wether I like it or not.

I'm not saying you should care about all those corner features (I'm giving those die hard Turbo Pascal users the finger as well), but things are definately more complicated than just providing a similar UI.